I grew up on "da West Side" of Manchester, 962 Goffstown Road to be exact. It was an entirely residential neighborhood, except for this Cains (they make relish and mustard and other condiments) distribution center across the street from our house. They would often through out old food in their dumpster and one night we came home to notice our lawn was 'shining.' It turned out that some local hellions had entertained themselves by slinging individual cheese slices across the street, aiming at our lamppost. We collected 2 grocery bags of cheese that night. A couple years later I got my chin stitched up when I fell off my bike at Cains. We always thought that it ought to be a convenience store. That would only be convenient. We moved to a new house in 1986. The next year, Cains moved out, and a convenience store moved in.
On November 3, 1980, I got a sister, Angela Suzanne.
The new house was cool. It had strange things like a bidet, cedar closets and a big chalkboard in the basement. To this day, it still isn't our house. We live in "Dr. Gagnon's house" who was the doctor that lived there a long time ago.
I used a computer for the first time at a friend of my mother's house. I remember playing some game or something and saving my file on this really big disk. I guess it might not have been all that big, but you know how things seem big when you're a kid?
After that, my first computer was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 that my Pepere (translated for the non-francophone: grandfather) gave me. I was completely amazed at my first program:
10 print "jeff"; 20 goto 10
Those were the good 'ol days when there were no worries about global variables or object-oriented programming. The Timex had 1K of RAM and stored programs on my cassette player. The keyboard was this membrane thing and you didn't actually type out commands. There was three shifts that you would press so you could get a 'RUN' in there.
After the days of innocence were gone, I pleaded my parents for a $250 ADAM computer. It was great. It had a slot for ColecoVision games and it booted up to a word processor! It was still better than Word 6.
I would spend my nights reading my BASIC manual and checking off the pages I understood. I never really considered myself to be any kind of computer expert, I just had fun making the computers go into infinite loops, beeping all the while in my school's computer lab.
I spent 8 years in Catholic school at West Side Catholic Regional School or St. Marie's or some other weird name. Since then, it has merged with a couple of other Catholic schools and moved.
I enjoyed literature and reading in grammar school. My greatest accomplishment was getting the "Excellence in Library Skills Award" in 8th grade. Wow, I was so cool. There were so many stoopid things in grammar school that I just can't rationalize anymore. I remember getting lunchtime detention once for doing my homework in pen. Maybe it was pencil. I don't remember, but it certainly was a no-no then.
High school was much better. I found some good friends and joined the Men of the Dot (MOTD), a silly little group of band geeks (except for me) who like to go hiking and camping when we aren't too lazy.
I had a cushy job working at the St. John the Baptist Church Rectory and I actually got to watch TV at work.
The summer after my freshman year was horrible. I couldn't find a job and therefore a reason for my existence. I narrowly escaped a job with Vector Marketing (selling knives) and resolved to taking several temp jobs. (Note: Vector Marketing is a legitimate business, their knives are high-quality stuff, and I know some people who made a ton of money selling them, but begging people to buy knives is just not my thing. Nonetheless, the fact that they don't advertise that the work is selling knives is kinda shady.) My favorite temp job was the day my job was to count cars. I sat out in the middle of an HQ parking lot, clicking a counter when a car left, and clicking another counter when a car entered the parking lot. The rest of the jobs were much worse: the wires job and the infamous filing job. Don't ask.
Anyway, sophomore year was better. I nearly went insane, but at least I had a purpose. I was simultaneously News Editor for The Bucknellian, Systems Manager for The Bucknellian, Program Director for Newman House and I put up the first issues of The Online Bucknellian that semester as well. I also had 5 classes (about 22 hours or so) which I absolutely hated. I guess you could say it built character.
In the summer of 1994, the MOTD bought $20 rubber boats and floated 7 miles down the mighty Merrimack river. I commandeered my boat, christened the "Ship 'O Fool." It was a great trip, especially when we floated past the 'cascade of sewage' and I got poison ivy while trying to get back on land.
Some journalists saved me some time and wrote stories about the rest of my life.
Yesterday I was eaten by a giant squid. The End.